Breakers and granite / by John Gould Fletcher [electronic text]

IN NEW ENGLAND

NEW ENGLAND SUNSET

The sky, blue of metal, through which the sun blows in passing many a hammered petal of gold, rose, vermilion, from its frozen lips. The water deepest blue of sapphires, glancing flint-shaped play of wavelets out of which the sun strikes coppery fires. The earth smooth blue of granite; bald scarps undulating, modulating; brown, grey-brown, blue-grey and blue. The trees brittle coral, blue and silver, birch and maple, crackling, shaking thinner than coral ever grew.

Gurgle, boom, surge: the sea is scouring and worrying the granite. All day long under the wind that roars down from northeastward, the tide has been rising' wrinkled waves of bluish steel tipped with magic sprays of ice. The shallow water clashes and falls in tinkling crystals and waterfalls over the shaggy jagged sides. The tide is not yet fully risen although it is near sunset. In the west a few dull smoky-purple clouds resist yet the full flood of trebly refined light which the sun is pouring still from a gap between the hills. Surge, boom and,gurgle: the granite rocks and thrills.

From far away, the upheaved boulders, tossed and scattered up the hillside, look to a city that was builded with narrow lanes and houses pressing downwards to the sea. One can almost trace the fretted lines of chimneys, almost see the rising coils of smoke. Rusty lichens spot the granite rocks with scarlet smudges, masses of crumbled earth, upsurge amid them. Yonder is one that is grey and barren, towering like a monument. Besides it is another, golden on top and curved like a dome by some forgotten architect. There is another deep brown and squat, like the church of some dead sect. Through the fantastic play of sunlight and wind over their surfaces, maybe pulses and plays the life of some strange deity. The few last clouds remaining throw over them pathetic violet shadows shifting from time to time. Elsewhere there is nothing but glancing knives of sunlight, cutting through the rime, chipping, hacking, nicking, flickering, tapping at these barriers. The wind whirls the long dead grasses about them, like a million thin grey hands striving in vain to destroy the secret powers of the stone. They are blown this way and that. The sun is almost gone.

Gurgle, boom, surge: the sea no more is flat and blue. It rises, rises, rises, steadily eating its pathway

through. It is a shallow, cruel sea; crabs and scavenger-fish cling greedily to the granite slabs beneath, grinding in their mandibles the little fragments that it tears away in death. Now the sea falls, but to rise again. At each hissing expiration of its pain, the sun paints it with copper-yellow flame. It seems as if covered with little points of fire, running towards the hillside, which sweep still upwards and higher. Surge, boom, gurgle. It must fling 'mid topmost boulders one great frozcn torch of silver ere the sun puts out its lamp and goes away.

Now the sun whirls its last fire lances against the glancing edges of granite. They stick and kindle and hang flapping. Here a polished, wind-smoothed face glows all over as if covered with rows of sheeted panes, that dangle in loose plates for the sun to tap his tune upon. Here a hulking shapeless mass, like a great grey frog, wears one blue-white diamond on his forehead. Now that other towering one, which seems to lean over a low damp-looking spot, circled with rows of topaz lanterns, is slowly going out. But over there that dull rakish looking row which stare and jostle each other like tenements in the slums; why, they fairly burn with light: they are more gay than any now!

Surge, boom, and gurgle: the sea swelters under a menacing glare of bronze. The ebb and flow of breakers races onwards without stint. Now the dying sky takes the hint: it, too, rekindles with unearthly'\ light burning away the black-speckled curtains that ascend into the night. Is that the moon rising? Redder and redder the sky becomes: it flashes surprising; with rosy arcs it whistles and hums. What is that sound? It is the Wind which is bellowing like maddened Sirens; the sea that is clashing like jangled bells. The crimson fumes mount up and overswell the sky, drowning the stars in their menace, higher and higher! Fire! Fire! All the sky is afire!

The sky, ashen grey of smoke through which the choked light struggles slowly bringing out earth's hideous ugliness; the water one grey messy sheet of ice; the earth dull grey of trampled snows, colourless, sullen. The trees stark masses of black ragged pines, shrieking, whispering with the wind that bends and lashes their lines. Darkness on the trees, stark and brooding; darkness, total darkness on the earth.

March 4, 1915.

NEW ENGLAND WINTER

Red-brown earth, Indian earth, Scorched earth, yet frozen earth, Earth everywhere deliciously sombre, Beneath the snow-blue afternoon: Stern earth, secret earth, Rock strewn hillside and gurgling stream, You hold some mystery of the past, Which you can never explain — which no one has taught you to speak.

Earth for roamers, earth for hunters, earth desolate and free as any ocean, Rolling crest and swampy hollow, earth Unshaped by any tradition, Half-finished earth, useless earth, where are your scoundrels, saints and lovers?The boulders grin and the east wind shakes doggedly the black pines.

Earth everywhere rejecting life—sparse graveyards and sparse forests — Mournful meadows and white birches that quiver ghostily— The marsh breaking away to seaward in long flat mournful circles, The tide-rock lifting its forehead in the distance sullenly:

E.arth that should have been left a wilderness —earth not meant for habitation, Sordid, grasping, evil earth, your robes have dropt from you; Naked you lie, hard sinews out of the snow half peeping: And only the warmth of a land you scorn could ever your life renew.

1914.

THE EMPTY HOUSE

Out from my window-sill I lean And see a straight, four-storied row Of houses,

Once long ago These had their glory; they were built In the fair palmy days before The Civil War when all the seas Saw the white sails of Yankee ships Scurrying home with spice and gold. And many of these houses hung Proud wisps of crape upon their doors On learning that a son had died At Chancellorsville or Fredericksburg, Their offering to the Union side.

But man's forever drifting will Again took hold of him; again, Before some plastering had dried, Society packed up, moved away. Now, would you look upon these houses,

You would-not think they ever had a prime, A grim four-storied serried row Of rooms to let; at any time Tenants are moving in or out: Families drifting down or struggling still To keep their heads up and not down. A tragic busy pettiness Has settled on them all But one. And in that one, when I came here, A family lived, but with its trunks packed up, And now that family's gone.

Its shutterless, blindless windows let you look inside And see the sunlight checkering the bare floor With patterns from the window frames All day; Its backyard neatly swept Contains no crammed ash-barrels and no lines For clothes to flap about on; It does not look by day as if it had Ever a living soul beneath its roof. It marks a gap in the grim line, No house at all, but an untenanted shell.

But when the windows up and down those fronts With yellow glimmer of gas blaze forth, I know it is the only house that lives tn all that long four-storied row. The others are mere shelves, layer on layer, Of warring, separate personalities; A jangle and a tangle of emotions, Without a single meaning running through them. But it, the empty house, has mastered all its secrets; Eyelessly proud, It watches, it is master; It sees the other houses still incessantly learning The secret it remembers, And which it can repeat the last dim syllable of.

October, 1915.

CLIPPER-SHIPS

Beautiful as a tiered cloud, skysails set and shrouds twanging, she emerges from the surges that keep running away before day on the low Pacific shore. With the roar of the wind blowing half a gale after she heels and lunges, and buries her bows in the smother, lifting them swiftly, and scattering the glistening spray-drops from her jibsails with laughter. Her spars are cracking, her royals are half splitting, her lower stunsail booms are bent aside, like bowstrings ready to loose, and the water is roaring into her scuppers, but she still staggers out under a full press of sail, her upper trucks enkindled by the sun into shafts of rosy flame.

Oh, the anchor is up and the sails they are set, and it's 'way Rio; 'round Cape Stiff and up to Boston, ninety days hauling at the ropes: the decks slope and the stays creak as she lurches into it, sending her jib awash at every thrust, and a handful of dust and a thirst to make you weep, are all we get for being two years away to sea.

Topgallant stunsail has carried away! Ease the spanker! The anchor is rusted on the deck. Men in short duck trousers, wide-brimmed straw hats, with brown mahogany faces, pace up, and down, spinning the wornout yarns they told a year ago. Some are coiling rope; some smoke; "Chips" is picking oakum near the boats. Ten thousand miles away lies their last port. In the rigging climbs a hairy monkey, and a green parakeet screams at the masthead. In the dead calm of a boiling noonday near the line, she lifts her spread of shining canvas from heel to truck, from jib o' jib to ringtail, from moonsails to watersails. Men have hung their washing in the stays so she can get more way on her. She ghosts along before an imperceptible breeze, the sails hanging limp in the cross-trees, and clashing against the masts. She is a proud white albatross skimming across the ocean, beautiful as a tiered cloud. Oh, a Yankee ship, comes down the river; blow, boys, blow: her masts and yards they shine like silver: blow, my bully boys, blow: she's a crack ship, a dandy clipper, nine hundred miles from land; she's a down-Easter from Massachusetts, and she's bound to the Rio Grande!

Where are the men who put to sea in her on her first voyage? Some have piled their bones in California

among the hides; some died frozen off the Horn in snowstorms; some slipped down between two greybacks, when the yards were joggled suddenly. Still she glistens beautifully, her decks snow-white with constant scrubbing as she sweeps into some empty sailless bay which sleeps all day, where the wild deer skip away when she fires her eighteen pounder, the sound reverberating about the empty hills. San Francisco? No: San Francisco will not be built for a dozen years to come. Meanwhile she hires with the tumult of loading. The mutineers, even, are let out of their irons and flogged and fed. Every day from when the dawn flares up red amid the hills to the hour it drops dead to westward, men walk gawkily, balancing on their heads the burden of heavy, stiff hides. Now the anchor is up and the sails they are set and its'way, Rio. Boston girls are pulling at the ropes: only three months of trouble yet: time for us to go!

Beautiful as a tiered cloud she flies out seaward, and on her decks loaf and stumble a luckless crowd; the filthy sweepings of the stews. In a week, in a day, they have spent a year's wages, swilling it away and letting the waste of it run down among the gutters. How were these deadbeats bribed to go? Only the Ann Street runners know. Dagos,

Dutchmen, Souwegians, niggers, crimp-captured greenhorns, they loaf up on the after deck, some of them already wrecks, so sick they wish they had never been born. Before them all the "old man" calls for a bucket of salt water to wash off his shore, face. While he is at it, telling them how he will haze them till they are dead if, they try soldiering, but it will be good grub and easy work if they hand, reef and steer and heave the lead, his officers are below, rummaging through the men's dunnage, pulling out hearers, prickers, rum bottles, sheath knives, and pistols. On each grizzled half-cowed face appears something between a sheepish grin, a smirk of fear, a threat of treachery, and the dogged resignation of a brute. But the mate —Bucko Dougles is his name —is the very same that booted three men off the masthead when they were shortening sail in the teeth of a Cape Horn snorter. Two of them fell into the sea, and the third was tossed still groaning into the water. Only last night the captain stuck his cigar butt into one poor swabber's face for-not minding the compass, and gave Jim Baines a taste of ratline hash for coming up on deck with dirty hands. Meanwhile under a grand spread of canvas, one hundred feet from side to side, the ship rides up the parallels. From aloft

through the blue stillness of' a tropic night, crammed with stars, with thunder brewing in the horizon, a mournful echo rises and swells:

Oh, my name is hanging Johnny,Hooray, hooray!Oh, my name is hanging Johnny,So hang, boys, hang.

The Great Republic, launched before thirty thousand people, her main truck overlooking the highest steeple of the town, the eagle at her bows, and colours flying, now in her first and last port, is slowly dying. She is a charred hulk, with toppling masts, seared gilding, and blistered sides. The Alert no more slides pertly through the bergs of the Horn. The desolate barrens of Staten Land, where no man was ever born, hold her bones. The Black Baller Lightning, that took eighty thousand dollars' worth of cargo around the world in one quick trip, was hurled and ripped to pieces on some unchartered reef or other. The Dreadnought disappeared in a hurricane's smother of foam. The Sovereign of the Seas, that never furled her topsails for ten years, was sheared clean amidships by the bows of an iron steamer as she left her last port. The slaver, Bald Eagle, cut an unlucky career short

when she parted with her anchor and piled up on the Paracels where the pirate junks are waiting for every ship that swells out over the horizon. The Antelope was caught Off the Grande Ladtone in the northeast monsoon; she's gone. The Flying Cloud, proud as she was of beating every ship that carried the Stars' and Stripes or the St. George's flag, could not race faster than a thunder-bolt that fell one day on her deck and turned her to a cloud of flame —everything burned away but her fame! No more will California hear the little Pilgrim's parting cheer. The crew took to an open boat when their ship was scuttled by a privateer. So they die out, year after year.

Sometimes the lookout on a great steamer wallowing and threshing through the heavy seas by night, sees far off on his lee quarter something. like a lofty swinging light. Beautiful as a tiered cloud, a ghostly clipper-ship emerges from the surges that keep running away before day on the the low Pacific shore. Her upper works are enkindled by the sun into shafts of rosy flame. Swimming like a duck, steering like a fish, easy yet dry, lively yet stiff, she lifts cloud on cloud of crowded stainless sail. She creeps abeam, within hail, she dips, she chases, she outpaces like a mettlesome racer the

lumbering tea-kettle that keeps her company. Before she fades into the weather quarter, the lookout cries: "Holy Jiggers, are you the Flying Dutchman, that you go two knots to our one?" Hoarsely comes back this answer from the sail: "Challenge is our name: America our nation: Bully Waterman our master: we can beat Creation."

And it's 'way, Rio;Way — hay — hay, Rio;O, fare you well, my pretty young girl,For we're bound to the Rio Grande.

March, 1915.